Media

Lost Exile

Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames, co-editors of The Exile, a subversive English-language newspaper based in Moscow, whose decadelong run came to an abrupt end in 2008. Inset: A Boris Yeltsin cover accompanied by a typical Exile headline. By Martin von den Driesch (Taibbi and Ames).

The demise of The Exile began, as so many demises have in Russia, with an official letter. Faxed to the offices of the newspaper late on a Friday afternoon the spring before last from somewhere within the bowels of Rossvyazokhrankultura, the Russian Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and Cultural Heritage Protection, it announced the imminent “conducting of an unscheduled action to check the observance of the legislation of the Russian Federation on mass media.” The Exile, a Moscow-based, English-language biweekly, stood accused of violating Article Four of that legislation by encouraging extremism, spreading pornography, or promoting drug use. The letter scheduled the unscheduled action to take place between May 13 and June 11. This being Russia, it wasn’t faxed until May 22.

An Exile sales director, about to leave for the day, received the fax and phoned an editor, who called the real target of the letter, Exile founder and editor in chief Mark Ames, at that moment a world away in Los Gatos, California. Ames in turn promptly called a few lawyers in Moscow, who warned him he might be arrested if he returned. Someone, apparently, had it out for The Exile.

But who? Ames likes to indulge a grandiose paranoia whenever possible, and did. A functionary? An enraged oligarch? Someone on President Dmitry Medvedev’s staff, or, more to the point, in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s circle of spooks? (*The Exile’*s first cover story on Putin, in 1999, grafted the man’s head onto the body of a latex-clad dominatrix over the headline putin commands mother russia: kneel!) Egotism aside, the possibilities were in fact endless. Since its debut, in 1997, The Exile, which read like the bastard progeny of Spy magazine and an X-rated version of Poor Richard’s Almanack, had pilloried, in the foulest terms possible, almost everyone of importance, and no importance, in Russia, and had made a point of violating not one but all of Article Four’s provisions. But everyone knew that.

So why now?

No one seemed to know that.

The one thing that Ames did know: he was going back to Moscow. Putin’s Russia is an infinitely more dangerous place for journalists than the crumbling country that had drawn Ames 15 years before from the same suburban town where he paced about now, but still it was Russia, and not America, that was his spiritual home. It was not for nothing he’d named his paper The Exile.

Several days after Ames returned to Moscow, the dour Federal Service officials, three men led by a woman, arrived at the paper’s office. When they walked in, a staffer old enough to remember some of the worst parts of the Soviet era, crossed herself and simply ran from the office, Ames says. The officials questioned Ames for more than three hours, going through issue after issue of The Exile, by turns offended, disgusted, baffled. Ames suppressed his urge to start cursing at the officials in mat, Russian’s profane slang, as he watched them thumb through his life’s work, but his restraint meant little: news of the interrogation soon got out, and stories appeared in the Russian press, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters. Ames’s investors broke off contact. The distributors stopped sending trucks. “They worried that everybody would be sent to Siberia,” Exile sales director Zalina Abdusalamova says.

Just like that, *The Exile’*s era was over.

Ames is angry—he’s often angry—about how it all ended. He’d always pictured some exultant, bloody end for The Exile. But he can’t claim to be surprised. “I always assumed that every issue would be the last,” he says. Indeed, it’s a mystery to many why Mark Ames didn’t end up in jail or a grave years ago. In its time The Exile was arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia, and Ames and his staff had paid for that fact, or at least for the fact that they were arrogant reprobates, many times before. Columnist Edward Limonov, the 66-year-old political provocateur in whom the Federal Service officials were particularly interested, filed his copy from prison for two years after being convicted of possessing arms, which he admits he intended to smuggle into Kazakhstan in an effort to incite a coup there. Writer Kevin McElwee, an American expatriate, had both legs broken when he was torn from the side of a building he was scaling to escape an angry mob of Muscovites, an incident that had nothing to do with anything he’d written—McElwee, *The Exile’*s film reviewer, was just a rambunctious drunk. On another occasion, a deranged and slighted man sent a letter promising to kill the “frat boy” Ames. Ames in turn published an editorial urging the loon to instead off his co-editor, Matt Taibbi. True, the many death threats Ames received took less of a physical toll on him than loading up on Viagra and attempting to bed nine Moscow prostitutes in nine hours, which he wrote about to commemorate *The Exile’*s ninth anniversary, but that was only because Ames approached the assignment with a rigor befitting a Consumer Reports exposé—“There really was no other way to tell whether these drugs actually worked,” he recalls with sincerity and audible exhaustion.

But far more dangerous in Putin’s Russia was *The Exile’*s serious journalism. By the time it was shuttered, the paper had published damning views of Russian life through three administrations, two wars, and a stock-market crash, ever since the freezing February night in 1997 when, penniless and infuriatingly sober, Ames had put out the first issue in a torrent of outrage at the sharpies and frauds who insisted that post-Communist Russia was a new democratic paradise, at the liars in the Kremlin, the dreamers in Washington, the academic careerists, Wall Street, the World Bank, the idiots in the press who’d never hired him—at pretty much everyone save Ames himself. Never mind that he and Taibbi would prove the hardest-partying Moscow media celebrities of their time, never mind that they wouldn’t just expose the place’s hedonism but come to embody it—Ames was pissed off. He wasn’t George Plimpton chasing Hemingway’s Sad Young Men as part of some romantic lost generation. He was living in the unromantic rubble of a lost empire.

“Everything was about free markets and capitalism and democracy, and it was all leading us to some great new future, but all you had to do was look around in the streets and see there was something fucking wrong with it,” Ames says. “We were in the middle of total devastation, one of the worst, most horrible fucking tragedies of modern times.”

Ames was from the start vindictive, and carping, and paranoid, and, in the opinion of Exile devotees, a group that includes many of its victims, he also happened to be right.

“They were incredibly gutsy,” former Moscow-bureau chief of The Economist Edward Lucas says. Ames once devoted a cover story to deriding Lucas’s reporting, and The Exile panned his book, but nonetheless Lucas read the paper regularly. “There was kind of a suspension of disbelief in the 1990s—it may be corrupt, but it will work. The Exile spotted very perceptively that the most optimistic Western interpretation was wrong.”

“They were very direct and visceral and often very scurrilous, but they caught a side of Moscow that no one else did,” Owen Matthews, currently Moscow-bureau chief for Newsweek, says. “They didn’t feel the need to hedge around with reportorial politesse,” and Ames is “a great stylist. I don’t compare him to Céline lightly. He has that quality of brutal honesty.” This from a man whom Ames repeatedly savaged in print, once describing his teeth as leaning “randomly like Celtic temple ruins.” Still, he’s an admirer. “I haven’t seen a newspaper that’s so breathtakingly dark and cynical and brilliant,” Matthews says. “They had something going that really couldn’t be repeated anywhere. It would be out of business in three seconds if they tried to publish it in the U.S.”

“They took me on for using journalistic clichés, and at the end of the day I was like, ‘You know what? You’re right,’” says Colin McMahon, a former Moscow-bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, adding, “I read it because it was good for story ideas, frankly. These guys were deeper into a subculture of Moscow than I could ever have allowed myself to be. I’d see something in The Exile and say, ‘How can I get this into a story without mainlining cocaine?’”

Yet The Exile was too vitriolic to romanticize for long or to consult just its fans. And listening to the critics is too fun. They call Ames and Taibbi, singly or in combination, children, louts, misogynists, madmen, pigs, hypocrites, anarchists, fascists, racists, and fiends. According to Carol Williams, of the Los Angeles Times, “It seemed like a bunch of kids who’d somehow gotten funding for their own little newspaper.” A former New York Times Moscow-bureau chief, Michael Wines, offered a no-comment comment. “I think I’ll pass, thank you,” he e-mailed, “except to repeat what I said at the time, and what Shaw said a lot earlier: Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”

Of course, a pig is probably not the farm animal that comes to Wines’s mind first when he’s reminded of The Exile. It was Wines, then the *Times’*s Moscow-bureau chief, who, having won *The Exile’*s coveted Worst Journalist in Russia March Madness contest in 2001, was typing in his office when Ames and Taibbi rushed in unannounced and, by way of congratulations, slammed a pie in his face. The pie was made with fresh vanilla cream, hand-puréed strawberry, and five ounces of horse semen.

‘That’s what he said?,” Ames asks when I relay Wines’s comment. “He said the same thing back then, the poor bastard.”

It’s a late-November afternoon and Ames is sitting unrepentantly at his kitchen table, next to a window looking out onto a cheerless backyard complex, in the second-floor Brooklyn sublet where he and his wife moved a month earlier after deciding to leave Russia for good. It’s been 15 years since Ames first moved to Moscow. Now a contributor to The Nation and the Daily Beast and a guest commentator on MSNBC, Ames, who’s just woken up—it’s 2:30 p.m.—is typing a Nation column indifferently on a laptop. He’s more interested in a documentary on TV about life in the Pleistocene era. “I feel bad for the Neanderthals,” he says. “They ran into Cro-Magnon man and just got stomped.” He takes a break to crush some Adderall pills in a bowl, the powder from which he then daubs onto his tongue, washing it back with his third cup of black coffee.

Ames looks younger than his 44 years, handsome in a prehistoric and only slightly demonic way, at six feet four inches with the thick neck and headstone torso of the all-league defensive end he was in Los Gatos, a San Jose suburb. He’s wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt, white socks with no shoes, and a black Oakland Raiders cap pulled low over his already shadowy eyes and vehement face, which seems to grow darker by the hour. Thanks to his coloring, the Moscow police often mistook him for a “black ass,” slang for a migrant from the Caucuses, and delighted in shaking him down for bribes.

In the bedroom, his 27-year-old wife, Anastasia, is still asleep, and in the next room over, among half-emptied suitcases, sits an unopened hulking green Samsonite festooned with FedEx packing tape. It contains the complete and now sole paper archive of The Exile. Just before the interrogation, Ames had Exile editor Yasha Levine secretly pack up all 285 back issues and fly them to the States.

Ames opens the suitcase and removes the bundles of newsprint, gingerly laying them on the floor. Some have been professionally bound and jacketed, while others, in fitting samizdat fashion, have been thrown together and sewn up with string. Kneeling, he opens the most yellowed bundle to the inaugural issue, No. 0, dated February 6, 1997. The red X in The eXile, a graphic betrayal that in two strokes turns democracy into anarchy, is faded but still big and raw and eye-grabbing. He leafs through his first columns. I ask the last time he’s looked at them.

“It’s been a long fucking time. I don’t like looking back,” he says.

“Why?,” I ask.

“What’s the point?” he says.

That Ames produced even a single issue of The Exile is a minor miracle. His entrance into the Moscow media world could hardly have been less auspicious. After stints working for a wine dealer and a Mauritian importer, he started the paper out of gall, having tried and failed to get work as a writer at The Wall Street Journal, the Moscow Times, the L.A. Times, and on. (Ames confirms only the Moscow Times.)

At first, “The Exile was about petty, personal vengeances as much as it was about anything political,” he says. “Why have a newspaper if you can’t have these arguments and win?”

By the time he got to Russia, Ames relished rejection, he says. At U.C. Berkeley, he’d rebelled against the “bland liberal consensus” by flirting with right-wing politics, getting into arguments with humorless lefties, and falling under the wing of John Dolan, a literature professor and campus cult figure who liked Ames’s personal essays and macabre short stories, loathed though they were by his fellow students. Ames still remembers Dolan’s first somber career advice: “He said, ‘You’re talented, but one thing you’re going to have to get used to is that you’ll never get published in The New Yorker.’” Dolan also introduced him to that urtext for masochistic littérateurs everywhere, Dostoyevsky’s The Devils, the story of a doomed anarchic plot hatched by amateurs. Ames was hooked from the words “Stepan Trofimovich was, for example, greatly enamored of his position as a persecuted man and, so to speak, an exile,” thereafter tapping at every chance he got the grotesque vein in Russian letters, idolizing Gogol and Bulgakov, shunning Tolstoy and Chekhov. After graduating, Ames bounced around between menial jobs and taught himself Russian, and when the Iron Curtain fell, in 1989, one place beckoned. “The only way to escape was to go somewhere that scared off all those frauds and idiots,” Ames says. Russia “was perfect for me.”

Ames’s first attempt to stay in the country, in 1991, was thwarted when Communist generals tried to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev, which led to the heroic rise of Boris Yeltsin and his dissolution of the U.S.S.R. Ames watched coverage of the coup from Berlin, enraptured. Two weeks after Ames finally moved to Moscow, in 1993, Yeltsin, no longer much of a hero, disbanded parliament. Then the rebels attacked the White House. Ames had just turned 28. He ran around the city, chasing tank fire, ducking behind soldiers until they kicked him away. “It was this different world where everything was more intense and consequential and full of surprises,” he says. This was home.

By the mid-90s, a different species of expatriate was flocking to the Wild East, as it was known. The decade had all the indulgence of 1920s Paris and Weimar Berlin, without the bothersome art and poetry. There was too much money and sex to be had. Perestroika and glasnost were all very nice, but Russia was broke, and Yeltsin, committing to a raft of hasty privatization measures, ushered in Western bankers, consultants, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and opportunists of every other stripe, who joined the nascent capitalists and native raconteurs of Russia. According to *The Christian Science Monitor’*s Fred Weir, “It was, of course, the sexiest story in the world, because the great Soviet giant was transforming itself—we thought—into a Western country.” In fact, he says, “the fuckers were just looting Russia.” It was hard to keep your eye on the looting, though, when Moscow was overflowing with young Russian women coming in from every corner of the country to find work. “Every woman was hot,” says Alexander Zaitchik, an Exile editor. “The policewomen were hot. The tram drivers were hot.”

“Russians are always anarchic, but at that time they wanted to try everything—new drugs, new positions,” the Wall Street Journal Moscow correspondent Alan Cullison says. “The esteem of Americans was enormous. The men wanted to drink with you, the women wanted to sleep with you.”

But if libertinism was regnant, propping it up were graft, poverty, and murder. Many Russians were living in worse squalor than they had under the Soviet Union. Horrific public violence was routine, and Westerners were not immune, a fact driven home early in the party when an Oklahoma-born bon vivant hotelier, Paul Tatum, was perforated with Kalashnikov rounds in a metro station one evening in 1996. Nor did reporters enjoy special protection. Carol Williams investigated the Tatum murder for the Los Angeles Times and after concluding it had likely been a contract killing, she got a call from someone in the government who told her it was “unhealthy to pursue certain avenues of inquiry,” Williams says. The trickle-down venality began with Yeltsin’s cadre of billionaires and bumptious economists and descended to the streets and storefronts of Moscow, controlled as they were by overlapping criminal syndicates and factions of the city police and the F.S.B. (the K.G.B.’s successor), which provided the requisite krisha, or roof—protection by way of extortion, in other words.

“When I opened a business in Moscow, the question wasn’t if we’d be successful, but whether we’d be able to keep it,” says one American financier and entrepreneur who works for a large Wall Street firm in Moscow. “Would I be in danger, get kidnapped? Would I get extorted by a criminal racket, or by the K.G.B.?” He adds, “All of us were scavengers on the carcass of the Soviet Union.”

And the place where Moscow’s new expatriate plutocracy ogled that carcass was in the pages of The Exile. By the week in early 1998 when it published a cover story on Yeltsin entitled “The Bribefather,” complete with Mario Puzo puppet-master typeface and Yeltsin’s vodka-bloated mug receding into blackness, the paper was required reading.

“It was the bible. You’ve never seen a paper read like that,” Russianist and journalist Andrew Meier, author of Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall, says. According to James Fenkner, a Moscow fund manager, “It was like Facebook. It kind of just hit.”

Ames had spent the first issues maligning everyone in Moscow who’d never given him a job, but in the paper’s second month, when he took on Matt Taibbi—stole him, actually, from a short-lived alternative weekly that Ames had briefly edited, where Taibbi had been hired to replace Ames—it really took off. The son of NBC reporter Mike Taibbi, Matt grew up in Boston, attended Bard College, and graduated in 1991 while at the University of Leningrad. He became infatuated with Gogol, and spent his 20s bouncing between continents, episodes of depression, and jobs that included a stint in the Mongolian Basketball League. Like Ames, Taibbi was tall and good-looking, but in a safer, corn-fed way, with bright eyes and a wide, boyish smile. Unlike Ames, he spoke Russian without constant profanity and was a born journalist, having reported from Uzbekistan for the Associated Press and then in Moscow for the Moscow Times. Owen Matthews called him “the best city and crime reporter the Moscow Times ever had.”

“Before he came I just wanted to destroy journalism,” says Ames. “I learned how to report from Matt.”

What made The Exile so popular, and still makes it so readable, was its high-low mix of acute coverage and character assassination, sermonizing laced with smut—a balance that has also characterized Taibbi’s work at Rolling Stone, where he has been a contributing editor for the last five years. “One of the big complaints we heard for years—really violently angry complaints—was: You cannot mix, in one paper, satire and real investigative journalism,” Ames says. “And we were like, Why?” Taibbi wrote on subjects ranging from Washington and I.M.F.’s policy in Russia to Moscow prisons, labor strikes, and religious cults. He hung out with crime bosses, cops, and rogue politicians and wrote a series in which he lived the lives of ordinary Russians for days and weeks, working as a bricklayer, a miner, and a vegetable hocker and attending a Moscow high school. He was among the first foreign journalists to speculate openly on the connection between a series of suspicious apartment-building bombings and Putin’s ratcheting up of the Chechen War, now a mainstay of the anti-Putin canon.

Taibbi also served as *The Exile’*s good cop. When its prey had to beg for mercy, they’d turn to him. “There was always that slight fear that Ames would double-cross you,” says Peter Lavelle, an investment banker and journalist in Moscow in the 1990s. “Taibbi was the straight guy. When I met him at an Exile party for the first time, he says, ‘Oh, I lampooned you—I’m sorry. Let me get you a T-shirt.’”

Despite their contrasting personalities, or because of them, soon into their collaboration Ames and Taibbi were inseparable. Working to all hours in the Exile office or from Ames’s apartment in a monstrous Stalinist high-rise, the pair would pore over Russian publications, write, talk with sources, and bullshit, and then stomp through the snowdrifts and ice into the Moscow night, where their confessional columns and towering American swagger had already rendered them luminaries.

Stepping out with the Exile crowd meant invitations to the newest restaurants and nightclubs—including, one surreal night, to the grand opening of the Chuck Norris Supper Club & Casino, where the star of Walker, Texas Ranger and Braddock: Missing in Action III was, apparently, asking why they didn’t show—but Ames and Taibbi usually rejected those to throw their own debauched Exile parties or to get back to their regular hangout, the Hungry Duck, a place Ames, not given to squeamishness, describes as a “vile flesh pit.” Ask Moscow veterans about the bar and the most common response is a long, regretful groan. “Everything you’ve heard about it is conservative,” Peter Lavelle says, a hint of fear in his voice. “That place changed people.”

According to Doug Steele, the bar’s Canadian owner, “at the Duck you got laid even if you didn’t want to.” On Ladies’ Night, the doors opened at seven p.m., but the only people let in were women, as long as they were at least 16 years old. They’d drink for free. At nine, the men were allowed in. It wasn’t until the metro stations opened the next morning that it ended, and in the meantime, anything went. “Orgiastic” is an insufficient description. The only appropriate word seems to be Caligulan, and not just because the Duck was situated steps from Lubyanka, the former prison and Soviet torture chamber that now housed the F.S.B. The action was mostly elevated, according to Vlad Baseav, an early Exile general manager, with women and men alike dancing on the bar and on the tables, disrobing on the bar and on the tables, having sex on the bar and on the tables, fighting on the bar and on the tables, and then crashing in various states of undress onto the floor scrum. “They would get up and continue dancing, blood everywhere,” Baseav says. Steele recalls a night when the deputy head of a Moscow police unit, drunk beyond all reckoning, emptied his pistol into the ceiling and made everybody lie on the floor for three hours. Lavelle claims he saw a man stabbed to death next to him one night. “No one thought it was unusual.”

“Mark and Matt would go there and they’d be celebrities,” Lavelle says. “Especially Ames. People would say, ‘When are they coming, when are they coming?’”

Moving with the Exile guys also meant, if not mainlining cocaine, then at least having access to all the speed and heroin you could imbibe. Ames preferred the former, mixing powdered amphetamine into his drinks, while Taibbi, in a committed relationship for much of his time in Moscow, snorted bumps of white Asian smack.

By most accounts, Ames slept with as many women as any Moscow expatriate of the period. “Russian women liked the kind of sternness and scariness he had that didn’t work in California,” Dolan says.

One of Ames’s first regular columns was “Death Porn,” which rehashed stories of grisly murders and suicides from police reports and Russian media, printing them alongside crime-scene and autopsy photographs. He was most renowned and reviled for his regular “Whore-R Stories,” for which he hired prostitutes and then wrote about them. Like corruption and casual death, prostitution was a reality of Russian life that every reporter saw, often more than saw, but refused to discuss in straight terms.

“Everyone in Moscow at the time—and I mean everyone—used prostitutes. That’s what Moscow was in the 1990s. But no one would talk about it,” Dolan says. Ames seems to have had no need to pay women, and the column appears self-serving only until you read it. Some of the pieces’ poignancy and attention to detail call to mind Studs Terkel’s Working. But Terkel only listened; Ames partook. One memorable Dostoyevskian journey took him into the St. Petersburg night to a ramshackle apartment block whose residents let bedrooms by the hour with a former ballet student. Ames described the blunt safety razor Ira carried in her purse to spruce up for johns.

“I dreaded it, but I knew that it needed to be done,” Ames says of “Whore-R Stories.” “They were migrant workers with shitty jobs. The only way to tell that story was in first person, otherwise you’d end up moralizing somehow.”

“The most refreshing thing about Mark was that he was absolutely truthful, even about the most shameful things in his life,” *The Wall Street Journal’*s Alan Cullison says.

The honor of being *The Exile’*s most imperiled writer, however, belonged to neither Ames nor Taibbi, but to Edward Limonov, who embodied The Exile before it existed, from the day Ames first picked up his 1990 novel, Memoir of a Russian Punk, while working in a San Francisco bookshop. By the time Ames moved to Russia, Limonov was his literary idol. At that point Limonov, the son of a Stalinist secret-police man, had already lived several lives, as a thief, an exiled dissident writer, a punk icon, a louche sensation in Paris, a fighter with paramilitaries in Serbia (his memoir about that experience is titled Anatomy of a Hero), and, in his most recent incarnation, an anti-Putin activist and chief of the National Bolshevik Party. Limonov was the first writer Ames recruited, and he agreed to join The Exile on the condition that his spotty grammar and diction not be corrected. His broken English appeared in the paper through its final issue.

Much of the rest of the Exile staff arrived like religious pilgrims. “They represented everything that I wanted to be. They were like me. They escaped from America to escape a graveyard existence,” Yasha Levine says.

“My mother said, ‘Nobody will take you for a job after that,’” Zalina Abdusalamova says. “It was the best time of my life.”

And not just hers. Ames and Taibbi had soon landed an agent at William Morris and a book deal at Grove Press. The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia came out in 2000. Taibbi told The New York Observer he’d written much of it while addicted to heroin. The movie rights were sold to the film-production company Good Machine, now part of Focus Features, before the manuscript was finished.

The Exile offices were furnished with cast-off desks, a few unreliable computers, and boxes of Exile T-shirts, leftover from the last party or awaiting the next one. Ames and Taibbi may have written most of the paper, but it lived or died with Ilya Shangrin, its usually drunk designer, who was at his drunkest around the time they filed, seldom before two a.m. “Ilya would drink a bottle of beer per page that he laid out,” Jake Rudnitsky, an Exile editor, says. “There were 24 pages. By the time we got to the end Ilya was wasted. He’d pass out on his computer.”

Kostantin Bukaryov, the paper’s main backer, was a publisher of Moscow nightlife guides, with sidelines in gentlemen’s clubs. He paid Ames and Taibbi $1,200 a month, and what laughable revenue The Exile generated with its circulation, which never topped 30,000, came from advertisements for nightclubs, restaurants, and, most lucratively, call-girl services. After producing its first issues out of a spare room in, of all places, a defense-ministry building, The Exile landed above a strip club on the ring road, Rasputin’s, where it was situated above the dancers’ changing room. The office next door was outfitted with reinforced steel doors that the Moscow police attempted to batter in every so often.

What The Exile lacked in resources it made up for in ritualistic public humiliation. For one stunt, Ames and Taibbi, armed with forged stationery purporting to be from the St. Petersburg mayor’s office, hired the American public-relations giant Burson-Marsteller to help put a nice spin on the city’s police-brutality problem. Burson-Marsteller, at the time doing a lot of work in Russia on behalf of American companies, happily took the job, and The Exile published the correspondence and phone transcripts. Taibbi masqueraded as an executive from the New York Jets and tried to recruit Mikhail Gorbachev to move to New Jersey to become a motivational coach for the team. Later, reporting from Manhattan, he exposed Wall Street’s complicity in 1998’s disastrous ruble devaluation, bought a gorilla suit, walked to Goldman Sachs’s headquarters on Water Street, and sat down on the lobby floor for lunch, announcing to the security guards, “If Goldman Sachs can make a $50 million commission selling worthless Russian debt, then I can come into their offices in a gorilla suit and eat a sandwich on their floor.” The Exile took overt moral stands, too, vigorously opposing most American military actions, including the bombing of Serbia in 1999, when it published a Moscow city map showing the offices of American defense contractors contributing to the war, with the hope of inciting protests. Ames and Taibbi even staged their own protest near the U.S. Embassy. Taibbi held up a “free mike tyson” sign.

“One thing I couldn’t stand was Westerners who thought they had higher moral values than Russians, these people who came preaching Western civilization and then become connived,” *The Economist’*s Edward Lucas says. “The Exile exposed them.”

The Exile also ignored or glossed over a lot of important stories, most notably the horrific Moscow Theater siege, the Beslan massacre, and the killings of journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya, and went after people—too often harmless people or friends like Owen Matthews—with an ugly sadism. Taibbi’s press reviews can read like poison-pen letters. He falsely claimed in print that he’d slept with the wife of Russia scholar Michael McFaul, now a special adviser to President Obama on Russia, with whom he’d been carrying on a war of words. There was the cover depicting Condoleezza Rice in minstrel garb, and, during the U.S. presidential primaries, an Ames editorial on Barack Obama saying that his “perfectly bland, business-friendly swagger makes him exactly the sort of African-American who’d earn Trump’s approval,” an admissible argument made less so by the image of Obama’s head on the body of rapper 50 Cent. Ames insisted his real target in both cases was Russian racism.

Nothing won The Exile so many enemies, however, as the attack on the *Times’*s Michael Wines, a stunt even its allies were repelled by, though the recounting of it was another narrative gem. It launched from the horse’s point of view (“His name was Porobnik. He had never read The New York Times”), described Ames’s bribing of the breeder and Taibbi’s storage of the semen in a special thermos in his refrigerator, where his poor girlfriend had to see it every morning, and then unfurled into a dense indictment of Wines’s career, going back to his tutelage under former Times executive editor Max Frankel and his early dispatches from Indonesia and endorsement of the Kosovo war, and extending up through a recent softball profile of Putin. Taibbi called Wines a “grasping careerist who cheers the bombing of thousands of civilians from the comfort of his Ikea-furnished bedroom many time-zones away.” This ran with photos of a stunned, pie-covered Wines, wiping himself off with an Exile T-shirt. The results were foul but the argument was formidable.

Ames claims he’s not the least contrite about the episode. “We knew we went too far. That was the point, going too far. Everybody errs on some side and almost everybody errs on the side of caution. It was *The Exile’*s mission to err on the side of incaution.”

In Brooklyn, Ames is still kneeling over the archives. It’s close to five p.m. Anastasia, whom Ames met when she was a 17-year-old Exile administrative assistant, wakes up and emerges from the bedroom and quietly introduces herself. They speak in Russian for a minute. Draped over the Samsonite is the last issue of The Exile, No. 285. The cover depicts Ames, receding into a black background, above the headline good night, and bad luck: in a nation terrorized by its own government, one paper dared to fart in its face.

Puerile to the last.

“It’s kind of terrifying being back here. I find the rules here suffocating,” Ames says when I ask how it feels returning to the States after a decade and a half in Moscow. “I miss the extreme melodrama” of Russia, he says. “Here there are so many horrifying layers of décor and piety. Everything is at stake in this country—in theory it’s Rome, and yet it operates like small-town Nebraska. There’s so little real drama here.”

Yet Ames still sees corruption around every corner. “Maybe it’s from living in Moscow, but he really has a great bullshit detector,” Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel says of Ames. “He has a sense of the absurd and right and wrong and tells it like it is.” This could also be said of Taibbi, whose Rolling Stone coverage and frequent TV appearances (notably on The Daily Show and Real Time with Bill Maher) earned him a reputation as the premier bullshit detector and absurdist on the campaign trail in the last two U.S. presidential elections. He famously followed John Kerry around during the 2004 campaign in a gorilla suit. In 2009, Taibbi made a bigger name for himself with widely read and talked-about columns going after what he saw as Washington’s and Barack Obama’s complicity with Wall Street, particularly his old whipping boy, Goldman Sachs. Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner says of Taibbi that he is “absolutely the first person to come along since Hunter [Thompson] who could be called Hunter’s peer.” Taibbi’s Rolling Stone editor, Will Dana, is more specific. Also comparing him to Thompson, Dana says, “What they share in common is that they hate politicians.”

“When you meet Taibbi and talk to him, he’s this very cheerful, friendly neighborhood kid,” Ajay Goyal, who published Taibbi at the Russia Journal, says. “But he’s unique in that he doesn’t see anything that is good. He just notices the flaws in people.”

And it was not just their intolerance for cant that made Ames and Taibbi work so well together; the pair also shared a raging animus. Where it came from is unclear and probably irrelevant. Asked, Ames allows only that it “starts at home.” Rumors abounded in Moscow then, and continue to circulate in the New York media world now, about Taibbi’s relationship with his Emmy Award–winning father, though no one seems decided whether he’s out to anger Mike Taibbi or please him. Whatever the wellspring of the bile, Ames and Taibbi, at their worst and best alike, evoke Akaky Akakievitch, the civil servant in their beloved Gogol short story “The Overcoat,” bristling with the privileged awareness of “how much inhumanity there was in man, how much savage brutality there lurked beneath the most refined, cultured manners.” It can be too much to bear. One can come away from The Exile depleted from hating. Hating everything. In its eyes, fraudulence is a given. Nothing is pure enough, nothing cool enough. Everyone’s a sellout. As *The Wall Street Journal’*s Alan Cullison puts it, “I don’t know what their alternative worldview was.”

Chronic contempt may have been a sane take on turn-of-the-millennium Moscow, but in life, generally, it’s an unsustainable one, and eventually, inevitably, Ames and Taibbi came to hate each other. Oddly, the Wines incident seemed to mark the apex of their volatile collaboration and the beginning of its decline. By that point the partying and penury were catching up with them—Taibbi was for a time a full-on heroin addict—and the paper was faltering. “You can’t live like that for that long in a place as intense as Russia and not burn out,” Jake Rudnitsky says. The notoriety made it worse. “I’m sure both of them heard stuff like ‘You’re really good, the other guy sucks.’ Stupid coked-up Aerosmith Steven Tyler–Joe Perry rivalry stuff,” Kevin McElwee says. According to Exile staffers, Ames and Taibbi would get into screaming matches in the office. “Matt and Mark would argue bitterly. Matt would ask him, ‘Why are you so angry?’” one writer recalls. In 2001, Ames escaped to the U.S. for almost a year to do research for a book (Going Postal—Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond) and to come down off a four-year speed binge. Taibbi stayed on, reluctantly.

Shortly after Ames returned to Moscow, in early 2002, Taibbi left for Buffalo, New York, to start a new paper, The Buffalo Beast. Ames says Taibbi made it clear he didn’t want Ames’s help. According to some, it was Taibbi’s plan all along to parlay the Exile buzz into Stateside success. “[The Exile] gave him the Western platform he always wanted,” says Andrew Meier. Ames agrees. “I never thought I’d get anything of mine read. Matt never suffered from that worry. It was his birthright to be read,” he says. “He wasn’t ever comfortable with his own anger. Matt’s fate all along was to end up in a privileged space. He knew that and realized that if he could take an unconventional route there it would make him much more interesting once he arrived.” Ames claims that while he was gone Taibbi mismanaged The Exile, running it into debt and embroiling it in a libel lawsuit with Russian hockey star Pavel Bure after Taibbi ran a prank story claiming Bure’s then girlfriend, tennis player Anna Kournikova, had two vaginas. Ames says Taibbi pushed him to take on Bure, a hero among some of Moscow’s less humor-inclined underworld figures, knowing that it might endanger The Exile and Ames’s safety, even his life. “He wanted out of The Exile and he wanted out of my shadow. He was pretty clear that he wanted The Exile to go down,” Ames says.

Taibbi left the Beast after only 18 issues and wrote a political column for the New York Press (where he became best known for writing the uproar-causing “52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope”) and then moved full time to Rolling Stone in 2005. He tried to get back in touch with Ames many times, but Ames refused, because Taibbi “betrayed The Exile.The Exile was incredibly unique and fragile, and it was the only thing fighting the right fight, and when you turn on that, that’s it,” Ames says. “I don’t believe in giving people second chances.”

“I think he knows he became a mainstream caricature,” Ames says when I ask what he thinks of Taibbi’s Rolling Stone work. Taibbi won a National Magazine Award for it in 2008. Ames and Taibbi have not spoken since 2002.

After Taibbi left, Ames became *The Exile’*s sole editor in chief and its lead reporter, writing investigative pieces on covert U.S. involvement in Georgia and on oil disputes in the Caspian Sea and, in a painful Socratic episode, covering the trial and incarceration of Edward Limonov, in what may be the best work of his career. Jake Rudnitsky filed excellent dispatches from Siberia and the Urals. John Dolan moved to Moscow and started a first-rate literary column in which he was an early outer of faux memoirist James Frey. But The Exile was never much of a business, and Moscow was changing. It had become expensive and clean and was taking on an ominous neo-Soviet flush. The expats had gone home, and journalists, including Americans, were being killed. Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov, whom Ames knew, was gunned down in 2004. “Even the snow seemed archaic and doomed,” says Dolan, who left in 2006. The Exile nearly collapsed in 2007, before a group of private investors bailed it out.

Certain people close to The Exile, including some of those investors, claim Rossvyazokhrankultura did not cause it to fold. They say that Ames was tired of publishing it and that he used the government as a scapegoat. Alex Shifrin, *The Exile’*s lead investor, whom Ames accuses of abandoning him, would say only, “There are a lot of half-truths as to what happened.” Another investor claims the officials were simply looking for a bribe. “There was no government plot. I think everybody had it out for The Exile to some extent,” he says. But the investors didn’t “want to get involved with a media fight [Ames was] having with the feds.”

Ames flatly denies this.

Nina Ognianova, a program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, who worked on *The Exile’*s case, says the fact that the Federal Service officials asked repeatedly about Limonov shows “the audit was politicized.” She says, “Now that the mainstream space is cleared, the state has been methodically moving towards auditing and harassing smaller papers and Internet publications.” The irony is that The Exile was always far harder on America than Russia and, by the end, was probably more widely read by Russians than Americans. Finally, politics and finances may have conspired. “The Exile could never be profitable in [Russia],” Zalina Abdusalamova says. “If you want to be profitable, you have to be nice. The Exile was not nice. It was honest, but it was not nice.”

In June, Ames threw one last Exile party. At a strip club. “It was the most depressing party I’ve ever been to,” Yasha Levine says. “It dawned on a lot of people that they were never going to work on something this cool again. The dream had died and we’d be moving on to lamer and more boring jobs.”

They could at least take solace in the fact that The Exile won’t soon be forgotten. “It infuriated an awful lot of people in this town,” The Christian Science Monitor contributor Fred Weir says, “but they did a lot to keep us honest.” Speaking of reporting from Moscow, he then adds, “As a journalist now it’s pretty fucking bad and getting worse. Once again a foreign journalist is regarded as a spy.”

After a series of attempts at adaptation, the Exile movie, a rocky endeavor from the start, was abandoned. Producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey say that while at a meeting at the Chateau Marmont, in Los Angeles, “we had one writer tell us we were morally repellent for trying to adapt this book, particularly Ames’s part of the story.” Eventually a number of drafts were written, and some big names, including Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, considered the project, but “by the time we got ready to move forward with it, Matt said he’d chosen not to talk about that part of his life anymore,” Carey says. In 2005, Taibbi declined to renew the option.

The treatment that Good Machine wanted to film may have had something to do with this. Depicting Ames and Taibbi as crusading reporters who uncover Russian war atrocities in Chechnya and are killed for their heroism, it bore, aside from the sex and drugs, little relation to reality.

When I first contacted Taibbi for this story, he replied unenthusiastically. “Ugh. No way I can talk you out of this, huh?” he e-mailed. “In the end nobody really wants to read about a couple of overgrown suburban teenagers writing about anal sex and the clap and then calling themselves revolutionaries when some third-world dictator gets bored of letting them stay published.”

He then fell out of touch, re-emerged a month later, and agreed to meet me for lunch at a Manhattan restaurant. I arrived late, and he was visibly annoyed. There was no boyish smile. “I just don’t see why you’re doing this story,” he said. When I told him that Ames was now living in New York he grew more agitated. I mentioned some of the Exile pieces of his I planned to write about, and he said, “That was covered in the book.” I told him yes, that was true, but the book had been published in 2000, and, frankly, I didn’t think it was very good.

“The book wasn’t good?” he said.

“No, I didn’t think so,” I said.

“My book?” he said.

“Yes, the Exile book. I thought it was redundant and discursive and you guys left out a lot of the good stuff you did,” I said.

At this, Taibbi’s mouth turned down and his eyes narrowed.

“Fuck you,” he snarled, and then picked up his mug from the table, threw his coffee at me, and stormed out.

The restaurant was packed with customers, and they all turned to watch as I sat there, stunned, coffee dripping from my face. The waiter arrived with the milkshake Taibbi had ordered. After wiping myself off a bit, I went outside, where Taibbi was putting on his coat, and asked him to calm down and come back into the restaurant. He walked up to me, glaring, beside himself with rage.

“Fuck you!” he yelled. “Did you bring me here to insult me? Who are you? What have you ever written? Fuck you!”

I tried to talk to him, but gave up when he walked away. I went back inside, paid the bill, left, and began walking up Sixth Avenue. Halfway up the block, I turned around, and Taibbi was behind me.

“Are you following me?,” I asked. He walked toward me, raising his arms as though preparing to throttle me or take a swing.

“I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do with you!” he said.

“Are you kidding?,” I asked.

And at that moment I thought he might be kidding. There was part of me that thought it must have been a prank. I half expected some old Exile accomplice, maybe even Ames, to jump out from behind a tree with a camera. Maybe they’d been setting me up all along. Maybe there was horse sperm in the coffee. But the anger in Taibbi’s eyes was genuine, and, after some more glaring, he fumed off. That was the last I saw of him.

Eventually, Taibbi sent lengthy responses to e-mailed lists of questions. “I once considered Mark my best friend,” he wrote. “When I left I never thought I was burning my bridges to The Exile permanently, and being shut out as I have been from all contact with the paper I helped build during these seven years, not even having my letters answered at any time by Mark or anyone else on the paper during that period, this is one of the truly unhappy things that has ever happened in my life. Both The Exile and Mark’s friendship were very important to me, as were the memories of both of those things, and I’ve lost all of that now. That I’m now being accused of not only wanting to harm the paper, but desiring Mark’s maiming or even his death, only deepens my sadness about all of this.” He went on to say that “most people by the time they get old are full of regrets about the things they never got around to doing when they were young, but thanks to the paper I won’t ever have that problem.” But, he concluded, “if you romanticize any of that ugliness, I’m pretty sure you’re missing the point.”